Articles
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Private by Design: How we built Firefox Sync
Firefox Sync lets you share your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords and other browser data between different devices, and send tabs from one device to another. We think it’s important to highlight the privacy aspects of Sync, which protects all your synced data by default so Mozilla can’t read it, ever. In this post, we take a closer look at some of the technical design choices we made in order to put user privacy first.
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Performance Updates and Hosting Moves: MDN Changelog for October 2018
This month's changelog, from the hard-working engineering team that builds and maintains the MDN Web Docs site, covers performance improvements and experiments, infrastructure updates, as well as countless tweaks and fixes to make your MDN experience better and better.
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Into the Depths: The Technical Details Behind AV1
AV1, the next generation royalty-free video codec from the Alliance for Open Media leapfrogs the performance of VP9 and HEVC. The AV1 format is and will always be royalty-free with a permissive FOSS license. In this video presentation, Mozilla's Nathan Egge dives deep into the technical details of the codec and its evolution.
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Cross-language Performance Profile Exploration with speedscope
speedscope is a fast, interactive, web-based viewer for large performance profiles, inspired by the performance panel of Chrome developer tools and by Brendan Gregg’s FlameGraphs. Jamie Wong built speedscope to explore and interact with large performance profiles from a variety of profilers for a variety of programming languages. speescope runs totally in-browser, and does not send any profiling data to any servers.
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Testing Privacy-Preserving Telemetry with Prio
Building a browser is hard; building a good browser inevitably requires gathering a lot of data to make sure that things that work in the lab works in the field. But as soon as you gather data, you have to make sure you protect user privacy. We’re always looking at ways to improve the security of our data collection, and lately we’ve been experimenting with a really cool technique called Prio.
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Dweb: Identity for the Decentralized Web with IndieAuth
IndieAuth is a decentralized login protocol that enables users of your software to log in to other apps. It's an extension to OAuth 2.0 that lets any website to become its own identity provider, leveraging all the existing security considerations and best practices in the industry around authorization and authentication.
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Firefox 63 – Tricks and Treats!
Firefox 63 comes with some long-awaited treats: an implementation of web components, including custom elements and the shadow DOM. Potch also covers the Fonts Editor, the associated font panel in the Firefox DevTools Inspector, and reduced motion preferences in CSS.
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WebAssembly’s post-MVP future: A cartoon skill tree
People have a misconception—they think that the WebAssembly that landed in browsers back in 2017—is the final version. In fact, we still have many use cases to unlock, from heavy-weight desktop applications, to small modules, to JS frameworks, to all the things outside the browser… Node.js, and serverless, and the blockchain, and portable CLI tools, and the internet of things. The WebAssembly that we have today is not the end of this story—it’s just the beginning.
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Introducing Opus 1.3
Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, audio codec that can be used for all audio applications, from music streaming and storage to high-quality video-conferencing and VoIP. This 1.3 release brings quality improvements to both speech and music compression, ambisonics support, and more.
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Dweb: Decentralised, Real-Time, Interoperable Communication with Matrix
Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over the Internet. It provides a standard HTTP API for publishing and subscribing to real-time data in specified channels, so it can be used to power Instant Messaging, VoIP/WebRTC signalling, Internet of Things communication--the most common use of Matrix today is as an Instant Messaging platform.
